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Transcendental Philosophy

Andy Clark’s work in the philosophy of mind has long had a strong influence on my thinking. I’ll have a bit to say about how his extended mind thesis figures into philosophical practice in my upcoming talk for the Media Ecology Assocation, but in this post I want to explore his work on predictive processing and perception, as he’s converging on similar conclusions to my own about the nature of perception, understanding, imagination, and action—namely, that they all arrive together in the co-construction of experience.

His tools and models for making this claim are different from my own, and so what most interests me in this context is how his (more advanced) resources—including a computational theory of the brain, coupled with extended and embodied notions of cognition, hierarchical predictive processing models, and Bayesian accounts of inference—match up with what I’ll shorthand as the transcendental–phenomenological resources of philosophy that I’ve been using in my recent posts. Clark is not strictly speaking a cognitive scientist, but he’s definitely closer to the “neuro” in “neurophenomenology” than I am. What’s at stake for me here is the following question, How accurate and useful are these transcendental–phenomenological resources in the face of cognitive science?

Here’s another short take in my sequence on German idealist philosophers (see Kant and Fichte here and Fichte and Schelling here). This time I examine briefly the role of the idea in Kant’s and Goethe’s understanding of nature. I also note Schelling’s influence on Goethe’s later philosophy, closing with a few comments on how the contemporary scientific image complicates Schelling’s response to Kant’s transcendental idealism.Continue reading

I’m sharing below another in my series of quick micro-takes on German idealist philosophers. This one tracks Schelling’s break with Fichte. (See my post on Kant and Fichte here.) This break in mind, it’s plain enough to see why Schelling has become such a rallying point in the Continental scene as of late. Not only because of the resurgence of speculative philosophy, mind you, but also because of related trends, such as the ongoing movement towards an environmental (or ecological) humanities. In many ways, Schelling’s problems are still our own, even if our empirical details are more numerous.

As Frederick Beiser tells it, “Schelling’s break with Fichte is largely a tale about the development of his Naturphilosophie” (483). The development of the Naturphilosophie can in turn be read as Schelling’s answer to the failure of epistemology to finally secure and describe the interaction between the mental and physical, the subjective and objective, the ideal and real, the representation and its object. In addressing the question, How do we know that our concepts correspond to the world? Schelling would break not only with Fichte but with many of the suppositions of philosophy after Descartes. As Beiser notes, “Schelling became convinced that rather than providing a presuppositionless starting point [in the Cogito, the Transcendental Ego, and so on], epistemology had some dubious presuppositions all its own” (471) such that “he recognized that the solution to the fundamental problems of epistemology requires nothing less than metaphysics” (466).Continue reading